NEW YORK -- The bright colors, fussy gowns and ever-changing
coiffures are gone. Nowadays her hair is cut in a short and simple helmet,
and she sticks to an all-black jacket and trousers -- the ensemble of
choice for New York power women.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has traded in the first-lady look for what have
become her combat fatigues in her battle to convince New Yorkers that she
is one of them.

The battle begins in earnest on Sunday, not far from the house she
recently bought in the New York City suburb of Chappaqua, when she
officially launches her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. From a hall at a
state university campus, with husband Bill, daughter Chelsea and her
mother Dorothy by her side, she will formally step out of the shadow life
of politician's spouse from Arkansas and into a political spotlight of her
own.

The transition has changed more than her appearance. Hillary Clinton
has become the epitome of an eager office-seeker, shaking every
outstretched hand, traveling the length and breadth of New York to get in
touch with a population more than seven times bigger than that of
Arkansas.

She has already hit some potholes. She took heat for: sitting silently
while Yassir Arafat's wife accused the Israelis of poisoning Palestinians;
failing to voice an opinion on the fate of 6-year-old Cuban boy Elian
Gonzalez; promising to march in a St. Patrick's Day parade, apparently
unaware that most Democratic officials shun the event because it excludes
homosexuals.

One of her toughest challenges has been the accusation that she's a
``carpetbagger'' who moved to New York only because it has a vacancy for a
Democratic Party candidate.

Her probable Republican opponent, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
hasn't declared his candidacy -- there's no deadline for entering New
York's Nov. 7 election -- but his term expires in two years, and he cannot
run again.

Brooklyn-born Giuliani has won high marks from New Yorkers for cleaning
up the city and bringing down crime rates. He can seem heavy-handed and
vindictive, whether sending out cops to round up the homeless or cutting
off funds to a museum because he considers the art offensive. But his
bluntness and fierce temper can seem refreshing compared to the first
lady's measured style.

As is often the case in politics, Clinton was much more popular with
voters as long as she wasn't revealing her ambitions.

When she visited New York during that fall of 1998, to help fellow
Democrat Chuck Schumer in his run for U.S. Senate, audiences couldn't get
enough of her. The crowd in one packed union hall went wild when she
showed up; it felt more like a rock concert than a political rally. As the
betrayed wife in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she clearly had New Yorkers'
-- and the nation's -- sympathy, and when rumors of a Senate run surfaced
and pollsters started to get interested, some soundings put her 10 points
ahead of Giuliani.

But she lost ground as the wounded-wife image faded and the Senate
candidate emerged. Polls now have her almost neck-and-neck with Giuliani,
and he has stronger support among white women -- women who, in the old
days, would greet Clinton with chants of ``Run, Hillary, run.''

So despite having already spent a year on the campaign trail, she still
has work to do before Nov. 7 to explain to New Yorkers why she should
represent them in Washington.

``There is a question that haunts many people,'' acknowledges her
campaign adviser, Harold Ickes. ``Why is she doing this? And who is she?''

The clues to who she is lie deeply rooted in her childhood.

Born in 1947, the eldest of three, she was raised in the Chicago suburb
of Park Ridge and has likened her family to that of the 1950s television
sitcom ``Father Knows Best.'' Her mother was there every day when she came
home for lunch; her father, who owned a drapery business, would kneel by
his bed each night in prayer.

Her mother instilled in her the steely poise Americans so admired
during the impeachment struggle. If young Bill Clinton's defining moment
was standing up to his violent stepfather, little Hillary's was running
home in tears to escape a neighborhood bully. Her mother sent her back out
the door, saying: ``There's no room for cowards in this house.''

Later, a Methodist church youth group introduced her ``to the world
beyond our all-white middle-class suburb.'' A teen-age Hillary baby-sat
for migrant farm workers' families and even shook hands with Martin Luther
King Jr. -- not long after her future husband's fabled meeting, as a young
man, with President Kennedy.

This early faith-based activism had a lifelong impact. ``Be ye doers
and not just hearers of the word,'' she intoned at several recent
appearances, prompting one of her hosts to respond: ``Thank you, Rev.
Clinton!''

At Wellesley College, she was a campus leader who made front-page news
in the Boston Globe with her commencement speech -- a strident rebuttal to
another speaker who derided '60s activism. At Yale Law School, she added a
year to her studies to learn about child development, then worked as a
staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund. Children's issues,
education and health remain her priorities and are themes of her Senate
campaign.

She spent 1974 working for the House Judiciary Committee researching
the constitutional grounds for impeaching President Nixon. She then
rejected a promising legal career in the Capitol and moved to Arkansas to
marry Bill Clinton, whom she had met at Yale. She worked for a prominent
Little Rock law firm, and kept her maiden name after he was elected
governor.

But when he lost his first re-election bid, her career-woman image was
deemed part of the problem. From then on, she used her married name.

Yet she remained committed to her own career. She kept her job at a law
firm while serving as Arkansas' first lady, and took just four months off
from work when Chelsea, now 19, was born.

Her biggest achievement in Arkansas public life was reforming the
state's schools, including raising salaries and per-pupil spending, and
instituting competency tests for teachers and students. As chairwoman of
the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, she went to each of the
state's 75 counties, held hearings, shepherded debates, and came away with
new standards that, accompanied by a tax hike, led to the changes.

In contrast, her effort in Washington to overhaul the country's health
care -- a job entrusted to her by her husband -- was a dismal failure. ``I
come from the school of smaller steps now,'' she said humbly at a New York
event last fall.

There were other humiliations in Washington too. After records from the
Whitewater scandal mysteriously appeared in the White House, Hillary
Clinton became the first president's wife to testify before a grand jury.
But her popularity soared during the impeachment drama, with two-thirds of
Americans saying they approved of her brave smile and the way she
soldiered on.

Now, as she reinvents herself for the next phase in her political life
-- declaring herself a Yankees fan, strolling the beach on Long Island,
quoting the Bible in a Harlem church and chatting about dairy farms and
droughts upstate -- she is discovering the huge difference between life
inside the Beltway and the rambunctious world of New York politics.

Already, the Republican knives are out for this ``ultra-liberal,
carpet-bagging opportunist,'' as one conservative mailing puts it, and the
question of the first lady's Noo Yawk credentials is bound to resurface
throughout the campaign.

But there are compensations, as the writer Nora Ephron noted at a
Manhattan luncheon honoring ``Today'' host Katie Couric.

``You can run,'' Ephron told the first lady. ``You can live here. And
you will never have to wear a turquoise jacket again.''